Sep 3, 2011 10:38 PM

Yesterday whilst in the garden a wasp flew onto my arm, it started to do something which felt like scraping/being rubbed with sandpaper. I assumed it was just getting salt from me but when it started to get too painful I squirted it with the hose to get it off. I found that it had made a small hole which was bleeding, does anyone know what it was doing?

Wasps do chew at things - usually wood or plant stems - to get fibrous material to make their nests. In early summer you can watch them chewing the surface of plant stems, wooden posts - even your garden furniture, leaving a pale streak with an audible rasping sound. Later in the year the brood has been raised, the nest is complete, and they tend to get a bit antisocial - allegedly more people get stung at this time. So it's entirely likely that a wasp simply decided to have a chew at you for fun.

No, but I wouldn't be surprised. If you look at a wasp under a microscope you see that the jaws make up a large part of the face, they are meant to bite into stuff. When wasps get into a moth trap they will use the jaws to snip the wings off the moths and take the body back to feed the nest. So a wasp obviously sees its jaws as a primary weapon.

Are you sure it was a wasp? I had this happen to me when a cleg (horsefly) landed on my hand. It started chewing and, when it got too painful, I tried to flick it off but it just crouched closer to my skin and kept chewing! I had to literally pull it off and it left a small hole in the skin where it had chewed through.